Willie Nelson (61 page)

17:00
P.M.
—Shopping in City Square. Take trolley back to hotel

19:00
P.M.
—Dinner—Italian restaurant across from hotel

21:00
P.M.
—Walk off dinner with a nice stroll through Red Light District

21:30
P.M.
—Dessert at Dutch Chocolate Bar, walk back to hotel

22:00
P.M.
—Nightcap at Hotel bar

This was the
actual
schedule:

D
AY
O
FF
—A
MSTERDAM

10:00
A.M.
—Hotel arrival / check-in

10:05
A.M.
—Visit coffee shop across the street from hotel

13:00
P.M.
—Walk next door to Italian restaurant for lunch. Eat fast.

14:30
P.M.
—Walk back to coffee shop across street from hotel

16:00
P.M.
—Still in coffee shop across street from hotel

17:00
P.M.
—Coffee shop across the street from hotel

19:00
P.M.
—Coffee shop across the street from hotel

21:00
P.M.
—Dessert at coffee shop across street from hotel

22:00
P.M.
—Coffee shop across street from hotel closes

22:15
P.M.
—Reluctantly leave coffee shop. Last patrons on premises

22:18
P.M.
—Feel way back to hotel across street from coffee shop, narrowly avoiding getting hit by the trolley

22:25
P.M.
—Asleep in hotel across street from coffee shop

The most important role Lana created for herself was personal chef. “I figured out what Dad needed more, which was good cooking. They were stopping at restaurants and the food wasn’t very good.” So she became her father’s cook, doing many of the same domestic chores she had done with her kids. Honeysuckle Rose was outfitted with a full kitchen, and Lana stood at the counter preparing three meals a day.

“He likes my cooking. He knows what he can eat—what upsets his stomach and what won’t,” she said. “You can’t afford an upset stomach when you’re about to go out there and sing.”

During a couple of his highest-flying years, Willie had hired a cook for his entourage named “The Beast,” who traveled in his own bus, the former Pauletta, Paul English’s old bus he’d gotten from Porter Wagoner after a smaller bus he had outfitted with steel plates proved too heavy to be roadworthy. Beast’s bus, the fourth in the entourage, was outfitted with a kitchen, booths up front, and a large back room. But the band and crew ultimately rejected his cooking, citing his Italian roots. “He was a Yankee and we weren’t Yankees,” Poodie Locke said. “I love veal parmigiana and I love pasta, but he baked everything. You got to have grease to make a turd, you know. I’m serious. Everybody was all plugged up from eating all this baked food. I almost went to blows with him, teaching him to make iced tea. The Beast was a good guy, but he just never fit in.” A cowboy could stand only so much cannoli.

The band and crew ate meals provided by promoters, with menus including both green, leafy foods that were often organic and, per the needs of Poodie Locke and others, meat and taters with a little bit of grease. As the rider noted, there was no substitute for bacon.

There was no substitute for riding with her dad, as far as Lana was concerned. “I get to see the last half of the show and then he comes onto the bus,” she said. “He and the band are real high, or not, if the show didn’t go well, but usually he’s real high. He’s happy. He’s hungry. Everything tastes real good to him. We’re rolling. The phone isn’t ringing. No one’s asking him to do anything. He’s got his bus clothes on, his real big T-shirt. He’s comfortable. Eating his eggs. That’s my favorite time. He doesn’t eat much meat. I make a lot of vegetables. He loves cabbage. Thank God I don’t have to please everybody. I just have to please Dad.”

Lana stayed up into the early morning, looking after her father until David got up. “It takes both of us to handle that, plus Mark’s office [financial manager Mark Rothbaum] to do all the legal stuff,” Lana said. “Then there’s the two other buses. He keeps so many people hopping.”

Daddy’s girl just wanted him to take better care of himself. “But I know where he’s coming from and that’s what he’s going to do. I just try to figure out ways to make it easier on him, instead of trying to stand in his way.”

In early 2007, Willie played a benefit for his tour manager David Anderson and David’s partner, Darrin Davis, a Dallas choreographer and singer. The couple had created the AetheriA Foundation to promote art in schools and award college scholarships for the arts in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. The foundation made its public debut with “AetheriA: An Artclectic Evening,” a gala fund-raiser, including a $1,000-a-plate VIP dinner at the Nokia Theatre in Grand Prairie, and featuring performances by the Dallas Black Dance Theatre and the Living Opera of Dallas, a vignette by performers from Cirque du Soleil, and performances by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Willie Nelson and band.

“Yes, I sort of thought he was nuts when he first told me about it,” Willie told the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
of David’s idea. “But I’ve seen a lot of nutty ideas turn out pretty good, so I didn’t want to completely squelch it for him.” Instead, he donated his services and those of the band and crew.

The band and crew had driven overnight from playing a gambling casino in Tunica, Mississippi, arriving early enough to indulge in that timeless road game called “Hurry Up and Wait.”

Amid the chaos of a symphony orchestra and stagehands at a rehearsal, Willie walked onto the stage to the applause of symphony musicians. The star-studded event, which attracted an audience of around two thousand, was a fancier-than-normal Willie Nelson and Family Show. His friends Kinky Friedman and Little Jewford, actors Morgan Fairchild and Larry Hagman (J.R. of television’s
Dallas
), and stunt-freak Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s
Jackass
fame shared the emcee podium. Johnny Knoxville tried to lead the crowd into a cheer for Poodie, but most of the audience had no clue who Poodie was. Backstage, Johnny Knoxville spoke admiringly of Poodie doing a pole dance at his home in California, while Willie and Kinky discussed Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom, bleached-blonde bombshell from Texas and the well-publicized paternity of her four-month-old daughter, while an effeminate cast performer from Cirque du Soleil walked past. “He sure isn’t the father,” Willie joshed.

Willie and Mickey Raphael performed six classics with the symphony, with arranger David Campbell as guest conductor—the trifecta of his early hits written for others (“Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Night Life,” and “Crazy”) along with Darren Hayes’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” a cover of Jerome Kern’s much-covered “All the Things You Are,” and a stirring rendition of his own “Healing Hands of Time.”

The strings, oboes, and cellos effectively conveyed the deep sadness of the melodies and the songs’ lyrics. His vocals were strong and assertive.

Willie returned to the stage for a very loose and very rambling forty-five-minute set as Grandpa Nelson and His Extended Family, the band augmented by sons Luke on guitar and Micah on percussion (the boys had just finished recording an album at Pedernales by their new band, 40 Points) and, for the last three songs, Dallas actress-singer Jessica Simpson.

Lest anyone think the idea of Willie performing with a symphony behind him was a one-of-a-kind experience, Mickey Raphael put the show in perspective. “Yeah, this was a good gig. But you should have heard us with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.” He was referring to the four-night stand where Mrs. Gene Autry showed up to present Willie with another pair of her deceased husband’s custom cowboy boots. “Willie didn’t take them off the whole time we were California,” Bobbie Nelson said.

O
N
a chilly April afternoon in 2007, forty years after the Summer of Love in San Francisco spawned the hippie phenomenon, three buses and a tractor-trailer bearing the Willie Nelson and Family Show rolled up to a side street by a park one block from the corner of Fillmore and Geary, signaling the beginning of a five-night run at the Fillmore Ballroom. The storied music venue dated back to the 1930s but was best known as the mother ship of psychedelic music in the late 1960s, where bands like Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Steve Miller, and the Grateful Dead, as well as concert promoter Bill Graham, got their start. The Fillmore had been one of the most enduring institutions of the counterculture ever since.

“It’s not a very good payday,” Paul English said of the 1,250capacity room, “but they’re good people and the room’s got a reputation. We play here for several nights every year.”

Rick Moher drove the equipment truck. Neal Smidt was behind the wheel of the bus dubbed the Smoking Bus, which carried stage manager Poodie Locke, audio pro Kenny Koepke, house engineer Flaco Lemons, lighting director Buddy Prewitt Jr., aka Budrock, and guitarist Jody Payne.

The second bus, driven by Johnny Sizemore, was the no-smoking bus. It carried drummer and business manager Paul English, his brother Billy, the band’s percussionist, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, bassist Bee Spears, L.G.—Larry Gorham—Willie’s security, Tunin’ Tom Hawkins, the piano tuner and guitar tech, and Josh Duke, the hired hand in charge of monitors.

The no-smoking bus was inspired by Paul’s quitting smoking after a house fire. He had raced back into his home in Dallas to fetch his black hat with the gold bling and some of his guns, and suffered permanent lung damage. Whether marijuana qualified as smoking was a running debate among the Family.

The third bus, with the airbrushed painting of an Indian warrior on horseback on one side and a painting of an eagle’s head morphing into Willie Nelson’s face on the back, was Honeysuckle Rose IV, the 2004 Prevost known simply as the Bus, containing the boss, his sister, his eldest daughter, his right-hand man, and his drivers.

The crew did their usual afternoon load-in. Tunin’ Tom invested close to an hour unpacking and tuning Sister Bobbie’s Steinway B piano as Poodie oversaw the stage setup, backstage accommodations, and hospitality rider. In the back of the room, Flaco Lemons tweaked the knobs and pods on the huge audio console. Upstairs, Budrock conversed with the house lighting director, matching his ideal lighting chart with her lighting computer program. In a dressing room off to the side of the stage, Jody Payne was pulling out the pickup from the base of his guitar to fiddle with the electronics while Kenny Koepke positioned the microphones onstage and helped Billy English set up his array of percussion instruments.

The band and crew ate the dinner served by the Fillmore in the back bar, talked about the previous night’s gig at the TV Land Awards show in Los Angeles, honoring classic television series, where Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who played Beaver and his brother, Wally, in the series
Leave It to Beaver,
showed up; planned group tours of Alcatraz; a medical marijuana clinic; and two golf excursions, and went through the familiar ritual of getting ready for the show. Several individuals were invited to step inside Honeysuckle Rose such as veteran
San Francisco Chronicle
music writer Joel Selvin and the manager of the reggae band Toots and the Maytals, bearing an herbal gift to Willie from Toots.

By eight o’clock, the auditorium was packed with a sold-out house of young and middle-aged hipsters primed for the night. Tobacco smokers had to go outside to a designated smoking area to indulge their habit. But the ballroom was clouded with a thick haze of smoke bearing the pungent scent of high-quality marijuana.

Fifteen minutes later, Scooter Franks, all three hundred pounds of him, scooted to the microphone. Scooter, along with his brother Bo, had been following Willie Nelson and Family in their van and trailer since the early 1970s, hawking Willie T-shirts, posters (“Willie Nelson For President, Paul English For Vice”), records, tapes, CDs, and Willie braids. Scooter had adopted a secondary role as Willie’s announcer, and his bullshit ran thick as a midway carnival barker’s as he hyped the five Willie albums out this year, including the fifty-five-song four-CD set (“sold only at the Fillmore tonight!”), cited Willie’s birthday (“He’s been saying that for the past two months,” Budrock muttered in the lighting booth), and told everyone that Paul English was celebrating his forty-first year with Willie (Budrock weighed in on that one too), and that they could hear this kind of music on
Willie’s Place
on XM satellite radio and could even call Willie on
Willie Wednesdays
on Bill Mack’s XM show. With a final flourish extolling the virtues of an artist who’s “played over six thousand stages” (greatly underestimating the real number), Scooter shouted, “Let’s hear it for Willie Nelson!” as the band shuffled onto the stage and the lights hit the huge State of Texas flag hanging from the backdrop.

The cumulative experience of Willie Nelson’s six-piece band exceeded four hundred years, a number unmatched by any group in popular music. Sister Bobbie Lee, seventy-six, wearing a black pantsuit with subtle sparkles and a black wide-brim felt hat that deliciously complemented her long mane of blonde hair, sat down in front of her piano. Helping seat Bobbie was Jody Payne, seventy-one and rock-star handsome after all these years with a full head of honey-colored hair and full mustache and fresh beard that tempered his crusty, grizzly countenance. On the opposite side of the stage, Mickey Raphael, fifty-five, stood tall, looking dark and cool in a black long-sleeved button-down shirt, shirttail out, jeans, and boots, one hand clutching a harmonica. Behind them, bunched together on a riser, were Paul English, seventy-five, the man in black and Willie’s best friend, sitting on a stool and playing a snare drum with brushes, and, at the other end, Paul’s little brother, Billy, fifty-six (“We don’t know what he does,” Willie says, introducing him to the audience), dressed casually, moving businesslike among bells, chimes, shakers, bongos, and sticks to embellish the percussive impact. Between Paul and Billy was Bee Spears, fifty-four, alternately sitting and standing while playing bass and keeping the beat.